News:

The Book of the Diner is well worth preserving. I only wish it had reached a broader audience when it might have mattered more. That is a testament to the blindness of our culture. If there is a future to look back from, one difficult question historians will have to ask is how we let this happen, when so many saw it coming. This site has certainly aggregated enough information and critical thinking to prove that.[/b]

"Traders at some of these primary dealers talked with counterparts at other banks via online chatrooms and swapped gossip."

Sound familiar?

Those quotes are from a 61-page complaint filed in the Southern District of New York wherein Bostonís public sector pension fund accuses all US primary dealers (the cabal of usual suspect dealer banks that transact directly with Treasury and "have a special obligation to ensure the efficient function" of what was formerly the deepest, most liquid market on the planet) of colluding to manipulate the $12.5 trillion US Treasury market.

The alleged scheme (tipped here last month) was remarkably simple and involved precisely the same sort of conspiratorial, chatroom shenanigans employed by the very same banks who, at various times, have colluded to rig FX, gold, various -BORs, ISDAfix, and pretty much everything else.

In short, the banks simply conspired to keep the spread between the when issued price and the price at auction as wide as possible, thus inflating their profits at the expense of everyone else where "everyone else" includes institutional investors and hedge funds all the way down to retirees and Main Street in general.